Bill Sweeney has been accused of “lies and deceit” by the chairman of Nottingham RFC as the depth of ill-feeling towards the Rugby Football Union chief executive threatens to boil over.
The RFU chief’s handling of the second-division Championship and the wider game has been under fire since it emerged he pocketed a salary in excess of £1m in the union’s latest annual report despite widespread financial troubles across the sport.
Writing in the programme for the club’s Premiership Rugby Cup match at home to Northampton Saints on Friday, Nottingham chairman and co-owner Alistair Bow accused Sweeney of “a tissue of lies and deceit to justify the contempt he had for our league and any club in this country with any ambition” and criticised “the cynical cut [in Championship funding] he imposed claiming Covid-related poverty”.
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Read MoreBow’s broadside comes ahead of an RFU Special General Meeting (SGM) on 27 March which was called to seek Sweeney’s removal.
The SGM has a single resolution to be voted on by the 1,400 clubs, constituent bodies and others who are members of English rugby’s governing body, which is “that the members have no confidence in the CEO and call upon the RFU Board of Directors to terminate his employment at the RFU as soon as practicably possible.”
The SGM was called after the Rugby Football Referees Union (RFRU) organised a letter with 152 signatures of RFU members. The RFRU, the Championship clubs and like-minded members are now operating within a group titled the Whole Game Union.
Among the contributing issues was December’s RFU annual report showing Sweeney and other RFU executives had received substantial bonuses under a three-year, long-term incentive plan (LTIP), at a time when the union was cutting jobs and losing £38m in the 2023-24 financial year – although Twickenham has responded that the RFU has no bank debt, £59m in cash and £83.6m in reserves “despite very difficult trading conditions post Covid and the cost-of-living crisis”.
Since then, the RFU chairman Tom Ilube has resigned, and been replaced in the interim by former World Rugby chair Sir Bill Beaumont. And the RFU has attempted to reassure the rank and file with a series of in-person and virtual roadshows over the last three weeks, featuring Sweeney, Beaumont and colleagues.
The i Paper understands Bow confronted Sweeney in the roadshow at Long Eaton RFC in Nottinghamshire on 28 January, asking whether he would resign if the SGM voted in favour of the resolution.
Sweeney passed the question to Beaumont, who said the chief executive’s employment is constitutionally in the remit of the RFU Board of Directors, not the member clubs. Bow reiterated that the point of his question was whether or not Sweeney would resign, but there was no reply.
The furore lends an arguably awkward context to the RFU jointly pushing ahead with a revamped Championship, aka Tier 2, for next season. The Tier 2 Board includes senior RFU representatives such as Conor O’Shea, its executive director of Performance Rugby, alongside Championship representatives including Bow’s fellow Nottingham director Simon Beatham.
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Read MoreSimon Halliday, who was until last summer the chairman of the clubs, with Bow as deputy chair, wrote to Ilube in November with a claim that the agreement over promotion and relegation trumpeted last June had been legally contingent on various terms being clarified, and that the Championship clubs had in the meantime been “been stalled, misled, misinformed”.
Bow has now added an angry take on the new Professional Game Partnership, in which the RFU is paying £33m a year to the 10 Premiership clubs.
Bow wrote in his programme notes: “Mr Sweeney and his executive have indulged in platitudes and half-truths around the value of the clubs outside the Premiership, using phrases like ‘return on investment’ about which he knows next to nothing, or he would not have been forced to double the amount he paid the Premiership simply because they asked for it.
“He has mortgaged our academy system and borrowed the money from the union membership to pay for it, while starving all clubs below the Premiership of any funding whether to improve facilities or even pay travel expenses.”
Bow concluded: “There is the need for an SGM so that the game can speak.”
An independent report into the LTIP commissioned by the RFU Council, and undertaken by the law firm Freshfields, last week found the plan was “an appropriate remuneration structure for the RFU to introduce in 2021, given the RFU’s objectives at that time”.
Yet the report was notably critical of the limited extent to which most of the Council and the rest of the game were made aware of the terms of the LTIP, including an incorrect reference in one RFU annual report that linked the plan to the recompense of wage cuts taken during the pandemic.
In their advice to the RFU, Freshfields wrote: “We would have expected the disclosure to explain the basis for the introduction of the LTIP, the projected numbers and the conditions attached to any payments. Disclosure could have better set public [and the Council’s] expectations for future years.”
The RFU said it would not comment on Bow’s claims.
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